preg_replace - PHP

Question

Afternoone guys and girls.

having a bit of trouble with replacing things that are NOT 0-9A-Za-z[:space] because I cannot find a NOT metachar for preg_replace. Does anytone know if one exists and if not what is the best way to strip anything that is NOT alpha numeric or a space?

Thanks in advance

Alex

Answer 1

Use negated character classes:

/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]/

You could also use the \w escape sequence, which is equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_] (note the underscore). So your regex would look like

/[^\w ]/

Reference:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html

Answer 2

More useful:

/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]+$/